The Betrothed (original: I Promessi Sposi) was written by Count Alessandro Manzoni. The Italian Manzoni (1785-1873) was a patriot, Senator, and Catholic advocate. He is best-known in Italy for his literary works, including his dramas, which were experimental. Manzoni’s masterpiece, and the single work on which his reputation outside of Italy rests, is The Betrothed.

The Betrothed is set in Lombardy in 1628. The novel is about the efforts of two peasants, sweet Lucia and courageous Renzo, to marry, and the attempts by the evil Don Rodrigo to stop their wedding. Don Rodrigo desires Lucia, but she has eyes only for Renzo. Lucia and Renzo appeal for help to the kindly Capuchin monk, Fra Cristoforo, and to protect them both from the anger of Don Rodrigo Cristoforo sends Lucia and her mother to a convent in Monza and sends Renzo to a monastery in Milan. In Monza Lucia is befriended by Sister Gertrude, who years before had been sent to the convent by her family, against her will, in order to avoid paying her dowry. Don Rodrigo eventually discovers where Lucia is staying and hires the mercenary aristocrat L’Innominato (“the Unnameable”) to capture her. The Unnameable, who knows that Sister Gertrude was partially responsible for a murder before she came to the convent, blackmails Gertrude and forces her to send Lucia out of the convent. The Unnameable and his men then grab Lucia and take her to his castle in the mountains. But Lucia’s innate goodness and innocence end up changing the Unnameable and his men and converting them to moral Christianity, and they let her go and devote their lives to doing good. With the help of Cardinal Federigo Boromeo Lucia is reunited with her mother.

Renzo meanwhile never reaches the monastery in Milan. As he enters Milan he is caught up in a bread riot and is arrested by the police. Renzo is freed by the mob and flees to Venice, where he goes to work in a silk mill. A year passes and Renzo receives a letter from Lucia telling him that while she was held captive by the Unnameable she swore that if she survived she would never marry. Renzo returns to Milan to find her and change her mind, but the plague has struck the city, and Renzo is one of those infected. He eventually recovers but finds out that Lucia was also infected and was sent out of the city with other survivors of the plague. Renzo meets Fra Cristoforo, who is tending to the sick and dying, and Don Rodrigo, who is dying from the plague. Cristoforo persuades Renzo to forgive Rodrigo and pray for his soul. Don Rodrigo dies, and Renzo is eventually reunited with Lucia. Cristoforo persuades Lucia that their vow of marriage to each other, made before they separated, supersedes her vow of chastity, so Renzo and Lucia return to their home village to be married. They then return to Venice, Renzo resumes work at the silk mill, and they have a family and live happily ever after.

Historically The Betrothed is important because it was written at a time when Walter Scott's Waverley series was the vogue among Continental writers of historical romances. The Betrothed offered readers and writers an alternative to Scott's style. Manzoni felt that the historical novelist must examine

the desires, the fears, the suffering, the general condition of that immense number of men who had no active part in the events, but who felt their consequence...an immense multitude of men...that passes on earth, its earth, unobserved, without leaving a trace.¹

In The Betrothed Manzoni focuses on the lives of the peasantry and of ordinary people, rather than the nobility. The novel is realistic rather than sentimental and romantic in its details. Manzoni concentrates on the psychologies and emotions of his characters rather than on feats-at-arms and the acquisition and loss of titles, estates, and wealth. There is nothing unrealistic or elevated in any way about Lucia and Renzo, except perhaps the nobility of their characters; both are typical peasants, and as such may be the first proletarian heroes of nineteenth century novels. However, noted Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci was not complimentary of The Betrothed, writing that “the issue” with Manzoni is “his psychological attitude toward the individual characters who are ‘common people’—it is a caste attitude¼for Manzoni, the common people do not have an ‘inner life,’ they lack a deep moral disposition; they are ‘animals.’”²

The Betrothed was an international bestseller and as late as 1900 critics were comparing it to Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma (1839) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865-1867)³ and describing it as “Italy's greatest modern novel.” Gothic novels had been the vogue across Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, but after Napoleon’s collapse historical romances became popular, and The Betrothed was an immediate hit. The characters became proverbial, and numerous authors wrote imitations of the novel. Modern critics go so far as to say that The Betrothed played a role in

shaping a sense of Italian national unity during the early stages of the Risorgimento – the great nineteenth-century movement that would lead to the unification of Italy in 1861. Indeed, this novel was a protagonist equally as important in the making of the modern Italian state as such major political leaders as Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi.⁴

However, with due respect to the novel’s historical importance, the modern reader is likely to find The Betrothed dull and torpid. As is always the case with works by non-English authors, the fault may lie with the translator rather than with Manzoni himself, but this is doubtful. Manzoni's concern with the sentiments and personalities of his characters leads to five and six page sequences of nothing but internal monologue, so that for almost every piece of action there is a long section devoted to how one of the main characters feels about what just happened. Between these passages and the stilted, too-formal style of dialogue and monologue, the 600+ pages of The Betrothed can easily seem to run four times that length.

The main characters are uninteresting. Don Rodrigo is too pale and unimaginative to carry the role of a villain in a historically important novel, and Renzo and Lucia are stupefyingly simple and dull. The Unnameable is the only interesting character in the novel. He is based on Francesco Bernardino Visconti (1579-c. 1647), an Italian condottiere. In The Betrothed the Unnameable is a Byronic aristocrat who feels that life is innately absurd and meaningless and that the constraints of morality and religion do not apply to him. It is only when he meets Lucia that he learns that goodness can be its own reward.

Claudio Povolo, The Novelist and the Archivist: Fiction and History in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2014.

¹ Alessandro Manzoni, Discorso su alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (1822), qtd. in Olga Ragusa, “Alessandro Manzoni and Developments in the Historical Novel,” in Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47.

² Antonio Gramsci and Joseph A. Buttigieg, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University, 2007), 196.

³ W.D. Howells, “The New Historical Romances,” The North American Review 171, no. 529 (Dec. 1900): 946.

⁴ John Jeffries Martin, “Introduction: Manzoni and the Making of Italy,” in Claudio Povolo, The Novelist and the Archivist: Fiction and History in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2004), 2.